The hazardous industry sector including oil & gas, alcohol, paper, wood, coal, plastic etc. inherently is engaged in handling highly inflammable substances in both indoor and outdoor conditions. The fires involving these substances have a tendency to spread fast and get out of control very quickly, causing enormous damage to life and property. There is ever increasing demand to enhance the safety of personnel and valuable assets from accidental fires.
Early and reliable detection of fires can be effective in controlling the spread of fire. For example, the FLAMEVision FV300 flame/fire detector can reliably detect fires as fire clusters with practically no false alarms. The FV300 or other video-based sensor systems (hence forth collectively referred to as spatially resolved fire detectors) provide an indication of the detected fire on (a planar) two-dimensional (2D) reference system. The fire detectors can output data which represent the center of the fire cluster as well as size of the fire cluster to thereby provide fire location information in the 2D plane of the sensor array.
Combining two-dimensional fire cluster center data from at least two fire detectors which have a common field of view of a fire can produce depth information which can be used to calculate a fire location on a three-dimensional grid. The estimated position of the fire can be used by control systems which can drive suppression devices (e.g., monitors) to deploy water/foam jets towards the fire.